Network Autism thinks gender id develops in foetus (title edited by MNHQ)

NAS conference was supposedly a conference to educate professionals. It was utterly unprofessional, contained numerous falsehoods and was utterly shocking. The person responsible is Carol Povey of NAS centre for autism who has done the tweets out saying how wonderful it is

The fact that society would rather try and break the laws of material reality rather than simply accept that the spectrum of normal human behaviour is a little broader than we thought, shows how deep the roots of this mess really go

There is nothing to be gained from acceptance whereas demand is created once something is pathologised.

Pharmaceuticals, psychiatry and psychology are all huge industries.

the desire to pathologise anything that falls outside of the very narrow margin of acceptable human behaviour has constantly shocked me

Hear, hear from me too. I've just said similar on the Fawcett thread.

Hear hear bygrab 👏

Difference seems to need to be put in a box to be accepted.

I've worked both with people with ASD and people in psychiatric care, and the desire to pathologise anything that falls outside of the very narrow margin of acceptable human behaviour has constantly shocked me. I've never worked in a school that wasn't desperate to break and remould their ASD students into their neurotypical ideal. They painted it like they just wanted them to learn coping strategies for social integration, but it was all bollocks. Why does a child with ASD need to sit in that exact spot on the carpet to learn? Why do they need to rote learn their spellings if that's not the best strategy for them? Nobody ever wanted to consider that maybe they just needed a differentiated curriculum and reasonable adjustments and then to be allowed to be themselves, it was always about forcing them to conform to the neurotypical model. The embodiment of the "judging a fish by it's ability to climb a tree" phrase. Kids go to school to learn, not to become clones of one another - there's no excuse in 2019 for neurodiversity to still be treated like a disease that needs curing. I saw the same thing in medicine, I saw so many women being assessed for things like Borderline when actually many of them just had personality traits which didn't fit the female socialisation ideal (i.e. kind, inclusive, happy to perform emotional labour and put their own needs last). The bottom line is that neurodiverse people are still considered incorrectly human and required to change, and GNC girls are still considered incorrectly female and required to change. Diagnosing gender identity disorder in neurodiverse GNC girls is the cross section of those 2 things - the eye of the storm for social intolerance to "incorrect" behaviour. The fact that society would rather try and break the laws of material reality rather than simply accept that the spectrum of normal human behaviour is a little broader than we thought, shows how deep the roots of this mess really go. And yet we are the one's being accused of promoting conversion therapy - for just wanting people to be accepted and celebrated for who they are. It's utterly mind blowing.

No. They're not.

I've seen worrying conversation in online fb groups such as Twinkl with teachers asking each other for ideas, tips, where to find out more, sharing what they do.

That's how teachers often work. More so in the absence of the current government's idea to be less restrictive on content.

Sen schools make their own content more than most.

So autism advisors are flapping around, they don't know why the sudden increase of gender incongruence (especially in the girls they are helping). They are reading off the internet, they are doing their own "research". They are jumping to conclusions. Teachers aren't trained for this. They aren't. I've been speaking to a friend in exactly this line of work and is worries me all the more.

This needs a scientific medical lead. Where's that * enquiry?

"They lose up to 30% of their bone density"

When they come out with something as clearly wrong as this, how can you trust anything else they say?

There are 3 words on the gender equipment slide that are the absolute truth from the person who produced these slides

"I don't think"

The rest is mostly a load of bollocks confirming those 3 words.

www.kingwood.org.uk/free-training

I think I'll give that a miss having watched the first minute of the first video. The lady speaking is "an expert on puberty having (myself) gone straight from puberty to midlife crisis" She then goes on to give us some facts about the changes that occur at puberty.

"Children grow and put on weight"
Doh!

"They lose up to 30% of their bone density"
What???????

I am autistic and the complete opposite of demi sexual. I find it very easy to be attracted physically to someone - it's emotions I find difficult 😉

That Demisexual nonsense is just another way to skew 'normal' sexuality to suit the purposes of porn sick men: If you're not permanently up for it with anyone then you're abnormal.

What I find astonishing in all this is how the same autistic activists who for ages have railed against Baron-Cohen's extreme male brain/gendered brain/testosterone-washing hypotheses as an explanation for autism are so happy to accept the same premise as an explanation for transgenderism. It makes no sense to me at all.

I know very little about autism advocacy and activism, so read these threads with great interest but generally keep my ill-informed opinions to myself. But this is the elephant in the room that has struck even me here!

I think taking the NHS website content writers to task on that GID page would be a good start.

I'm going to try and write to them this week.

I'll try and do the same. Perhaps a mass complaint about that page would be a good idea. The NHS page is where many parents will look first when their teenage daughters suddenly decide they're boys.

Going back to some comments a few hours back, how does anyone know if a fetus has been subjected to high/low or whatever levels of testosterone in utero?

There are some studies on the effects of prenatal testosterone involving mixed sex twins, but results have been inconclusive. They have investigated e.g. are girls more likely to have autistic traits if they have a male twin?

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4719693/

The thing is we already know that some girls have traits that could be regarded as ‘masculine’. It still doesn’t change their sex and it’s still not clear why it would be useful to regard them as male, any more than it would be useful to regard women over 6’ as male.

You also then have to ask whether, if it’s all to do with prenatal hormones, people who haven’t been subjected to elevated hormones are really trans. The more you try to pin down gender as a biological phenomenon, the less it becomes a matter of ‘self ID’.

Thanks Grabthars - science has taken a turn towards darkness indeed. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the GID page was written by trans activists, as anyone & everyone in this field seems to be handing over all their power to this shower of fools.

Great stuff, Grabthars! Sometimes I feel as if the tides and sands of time were sweeping round and burying me. And sometimes I feel the need to stick up the middle finger of anomaly.

I think taking the NHS website content writers to task on that GID page would be a good start. I want to know who wrote it and what source data are they using. Most of it doesn't even meet basic grammatical standards ffs. There was one paragraph that was almost unreadable. The content guidelines say that all content must be checked and signed off on, but also that it must have a link and the bottom to flag errors and that it must make it clear when it's presenting an unproven hypothesis or controversial theory, which it doesn't. It also uses the phrase "sex assigned at birth" and forgets to define "gender" but does define "genderqueer" which makes me think it's been written with input by lobbyists rather than doctors. I'm going to try and write to them this week.

Oh good grief, it's the hormone washes all over again. Thank you ByGrabtharsHammarWhatASaving for that Lancet quote.
What can we do IRL to counter this?